Resumption of talks with P5+1 will be worthless: Iran MP

ILNA: A senior Iranian lawmaker says the West's reluctance to reach an agreement with Iran will drive the multifaceted talks between Tehran and the world powers into a stalemate.

“Certainly, if the Islamic Republic feels that the P5+1 member states have no serious will to reach results in the negotiations, continuation of the talks will be worthless,” deputy head of Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Ahmad Reza Dastgheib, said.

“It so appears that the negotiations have turned into a tool for the P5+1; talks which have no results and could be deemed as ‘talks for the sake of talks’,” he added.

The lawmaker noted that said unlike Tehran, the West has not displayed any goodwill in the previous rounds of multifaceted talks.

The P5+1 group -- the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany -- should at least recognize Iran's minimum conditions and present their proposals in a way that would prevent talks from “returning to point zero,” he urged.

Dastgheib said the West should acknowledge that the situation has changed and that it needs to strike a balance between Iranian interests and their own, given the economic crisis European governments are faced with at home.

The lawmaker insisted that the prolonged talks between Tehran and the P5+1, will not benefit European countries because the Islamic Republic will not delay its progress awaiting for the negotiations to yield results.

If the United States thinks protracting the negotiations will help the White House at a critical moment, it is mistaken because the viewpoints of American voters have been already shaped and this approach is unprofessional, he added.

Iran and the P5+1 agreed to hold the expert-level talks during their negotiations in the Russian capital, Moscow, in June. The meetings came after three sessions of plenary talks in Baghdad in May and an earlier round of negotiations in Istanbul in mid-April.

The two sides had, prior to the Istanbul talks, held two rounds of negotiations, one in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 2010, and another again in Istanbul in January 2011.